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Title text:
The family lore was that we've had it ever since it was ejected from a star-forming gas cloud, but it seems more likely that my great-grandparents probably just bought it while on vacation in the galactic thin disk.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3281/
On a tangent, I hate how it's generation III as the oldest whereas generation I is the current. It's illogical. It should be the other way around!
I just learned this and thanks I hate it.
A lot of stuff does that when we don't know the definitive beginning, though. Wouldn't it be annoying if we theorized Population I as the oldest stars, and then they discovered two more generations before it? Then we'd have, like, Population 0 and Population A-prime or some such nonsense (astrophysicists love nonsense like that). It'd be one of those things like the Three Grand Soups (which is a list of four soups), or the Five Mile River (a 24-mile long river), or the NCAA Big Ten (a group of 18 college teams), or the twenty-two wonders on the list of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or the country name for Tuvalu, which means "eight islands" (Tuvalu contains nine islands).
Like the Spanish Inquisition taught us, never proudly name something after a number. You'll just end up having to leave and come in again.
Which only makes sense if you view it as “nobody wants to change.”
We just “Star Wars’d” it. The first episode is episode 3, but it’s not the first in the storyline.
It would be tricky to change a designation after the fact. If you retroactively designated all "Population I" stars as "Population II", then from then on every time you read any scientific literature you'd have to figure out when it was written so you'd know what they meant by it, and for stuff written around the time of the transition you'd have to ask the authors what they meant directly, and--
Language is supposed to make communication easier. Ambiguity in terms inevitably does the opposite.
They were numbered in the order that they were "discovered" (or theorized, in the case of population III). Similar to how exoplanets around a particular star are designated "a", "b", "c", etc. in order of discovery, so they usually end up not in any particular order in terms of orbital radii or size. Sometimes letters end up skipped when a letter is assigned and then it's discovered to be a false positive.
So there's logic to it, just not the logic one might prefer.
This is going to cause a lot of problems in a few billion years. Either they have to introduce negative numbers or a lot of signs on the edge of star systems have to be changed…
There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine.
Well, if they started at the oldest and then realized there were even older stars, then we'd have a bigger problem.
Astronomy starts with the names, then works towards understanding, which makes almost all the names wrong in some way. Sometimes very wrong.
See also: OBAFGKM and stellar magnitudes
It's like how Earth-2 had the characters introduced in the '30s and '40s while Earth-1 had the retooled versions from the '50s and '60s.